EigenSpeed: Secure peer-to-peer bandwidth evaluation

Many peer-to-peer systems require a way of accurately assessing the bandwidth of their constituent peers. However, nodes cannot be trusted to accurately report their own capacity in the presence of incentives to the contrary and thus self-reporting can lead to poor network performance and security flaws. We present EigenSpeed, a secure and accurate peer-to-peer bandwidth evaluation system based on opportunistic bandwidth measurements, combined using principal component analysis. We test EigenSpeed using data gathered from a real peer-to-peer system and show that it is efficient and accurate. We also show that it is resistant to attacks by colluding groups of malicious nodes.